Outreach
drorzel | March 30, 2015I hinted once or twice that I had news coming, and this is it: I've signed up to be a blog contributor at Forbes writing about, well, the sorts of things I usually write about. I'm pretty excited about the chance to connect with a new audience; the fact that they're paying me doesn't hurt, either...
The above link goes to my contributor page there, which will be your one-stop-shopping source for what I write at Forbes. There are two posts up this morning, a self-introduction, and an attempt to define physics and what makes it unique. The "Follow" button has an option for an RSS feed; this isn…
drorzel | March 27, 2015That's the title of the talk I gave yesterday at Vanderbilt, and here are the slides:
Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science from Chad Orzel
The central idea is the same as in past versions of the talk-- stealing Robert Krulwich's joke contrasting the publication styles of Newton and Galileo to argue that scientists spend too much time writing technical articles aimed at an audience of other experts, and need to do more "Galileian" publication aimed at a broad audience. And that social media technologies offer powerful tools that can enable those who are…
drorzel | March 25, 2015I mentioned last week that I'm giving a talk at Vanderbilt tomorrow, but as they went to the trouble of writing a press release, the least I can do is share it:
It’s clear that this year’s Forman lecturer at Vanderbilt University, Chad Orzel, will talk about physics to almost anyone.
After all, two of his popular science books are How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Orzel, an associate professor of physics at Union College in New York and author of the ScienceBlog “Uncertain Principles,” is scheduled to speak on campus at 3 p.m. Thursday, March 26.
As…
drorzel | March 17, 2015I keep forgetting to mention these, but I have two talks coming up:
1) Tonight, March 17, I'm talking about Eureka to the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association on the campus of SUNY New Paltz. This is a version of the talk I gave in Bristol, UK over the summer, but with the soccer content replaced with American football.
2) Next Thursday, March 26, I'll be giving a Forman Lecture as part of the Vanderbilt University Physics Colloquium (following in Rhett's footsteps...). This is going to be a revised version of the social-media talk I've given in the past. I need to blow that up and put it back…
drorzel | March 6, 2015I've updated the detailed blog post describing our summer workshop introducing writers to quantum physics to include a link to the application form. For the benefit of those who read via RSS, though, and don't follow me on Twitter: the application form is now live, and will be for the next few weeks. We expect to make acceptance decisions around April 1.
So, if you make up stories and the idea of spending a few days at the Joint Quantum Institute learning about quantum physics from some of the world's leading experts sounds like fun, well, send us an application.
drorzel | March 3, 2015
A few years back, I became aware of Mike Brotherton's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and said "somebody should do this for quantum physics." At the time, I wasn't in a position to do that, but in the interim, the APS Outreach program launched the Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant program, providing smallish grants for new public outreach efforts. So, because I apparently don't have enough on my plate as it is, I floated the idea with Steve Rolston at Maryland (my immediate supervisor when I was a grad student), who liked it, and we put together a proposal with their Director of…
drorzel | February 25, 2015Paige Brown Jarreau, who blogs at From the Lab Bench is in the throes of writing her dissertation about science blogging, and plowing through a lot of interview data. She's sharing some of the process on the blog, and a lot more on Twitter, where it's prompted a good deal of discussion.
One of the big things she's brought up recently is the question of why scientists seem to blog about their own research only on rare occasions (Storify link). My own answer is in there somewhere: blogging about something you're actively working on doesn't feel like a departure from doing work. If you're going…
drorzel | February 3, 2015It didn't make the news, because skittish media types are mostly based in New York City and thus don't care about anything north of Westchester County, but we had a big snow storm yesterday. It started snowing Sunday night, though, and kept up through pretty much dinnertime Monday. Both the local schools and the snow-day day-care program we signed the kids up for were shut down, with good reason- I had to go to campus for my 10:30 am class, and that two-mile drive was pretty nerve-wracking.
Since the kids were home for the day, we did a bit of playing outside, even though the temperatures…
drorzel | February 3, 2015Over at Scientific American's Frontiers for Young Minds blog, they have a great post on what happens when you ask scientists to explain key elements of a different research field. It's pretty funny, and rings very true, as SteelyKid asks me tons of science questions, very few of which have anything to do with atomic, molecular, or optical physics. so I spend a lot of time faking my way through really basic explanations of other fields.
Of course, even pitching stuff from my own field at the right level for small kids is a challenge. Which reminds me, I never did explain my presentation for…
drorzel | February 2, 2015(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn't sure I'd get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn't end up using a few of my original ideas. So I'll do a few additional posts, on an occasional basis, to use up a bit more of the leftover bits from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist...)
One of the things I was reacting against in writing Eureka is the popular idea of scientists as a sort of unworldly elite, off doing their ivory-tower idealized thing without worrying about…
drorzel | December 17, 2014I visited SteelyKid's first-grade class yesterday with several liters of liquid nitrogen. Earlier in the fall, they did a science unit on states of matter-- solid, liquid, gas-- and talked about it in terms of molecules being more spread out, etc. Looking at her homeworks, I said "Oh, damn, if it wasn't the middle of the term, this would be a perfect excuse for liquid nitrogen demos..." I mentioned it to the teacher, though, and she loved the idea of having it in December, as a call-back to earlier science lessons.
It turned out to be weirdly difficult to find assorted round latex balloons…
drorzel | December 15, 2014Over at Medium, they've published a long excerpt from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, that gives a good flavor of what the book's really like. It's about how the process for solving hidden-object games like the classic Where's Waldo books is comparable to the process used by Henrietta Leavitt to revolutionize our understanding of the universe:
There are multiple web sites and academic papers devoted to computer algorithms for locating Waldo within Handford’s drawings, using a variety of software packages, and these are impressively complex, running to hundreds of lines of code and…
drorzel | November 20, 2014That's "Science Online" as in the conference that folded, not "science, online" as in the practice of trying to understand the universe from in front of a networked computer. Specifically, I'm posting about David Zaslavsky's call for help in putting together a replacement meeting. There was a lot of talk about this right when Science Online went under, but that's pretty much died down, at least in public. David's trying to get something more active going.
This is, of course, a massive undertaking, and something fraught with peril. And it's not like I have any free time to make really…
drorzel | October 28, 2014As mentioned last week, I was the on-hand expert for the Secret Science Club's foray into Massachusetts, a screening of the movie Particle Fever held at MASS MoCA. This worked out nicely in a lot of respects-- it gave me an excuse to visit the newly renovated Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and check out the spiffy new library at Williams (where they have my second book on the shelves, but not my first; I may need to send them an author copy in lieu of a check this year...). I also did some random nostalgia things like grabbing dinner at Colonial Pizza (now in a strip mall halfway to…
drorzel | October 21, 2014That's "Mass" as in Massachusetts, not the stuff associated with the Higgs field... specifically, North Adams, MA, where I'll be this Saturday night, October 25th, at the Secret Science Club screening of Particle Fever. This will be at the MASS MoCA, tickets here.
The Secret Science Club is a regular gathering in New York City featuring mind-bending lectures, volatile experiments, and thematic chemical libations (special cocktails, that is). It’s like the coolest science class you’ve ever been to, but with drinks and a DJ. SSC rockets into MASS MoCA with a special screening of Particle Fever…
drorzel | October 16, 2014The fourth video I wrote for TED-Ed is now live: Einstein's Brilliant Mistake: Entangled States. The title is not just an Elvis Costello reference, but gets at the fact that while the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper was wrong in that the local hidden variable theories they favored are impossible, it turned out to be important and productive.
As with the others, I'm very happy with the way this came out. The images are great, and I'm glad to get in the point that Bell's key insight involves measuring different properties for the two particles, which is sometimes glossed over. It was…
drorzel | October 14, 2014The third of the videos I wrote for TED-Ed is now live: Schrödinger's Cat: A Thought Experiment in Quantum Mechanics.This is using basically the same argument I outlined in this post, but with awesome animation courtesy of Agota Vegso. I'm impressed by how close the images that ended up in the video are to the pictures I had in my mind while I was writing it.
As I said in that old post, I dithered for a bit about whether to run with this argument, but decided I liked it enough to go ahead. You can legitimately quibble about some of the phrasing being a little too definite (or that Schrödinger…
drorzel | September 16, 2014The second one of the TED-Ed lessons I wrote about quantum physics has now been published: What Is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This is, again, very similar to stuff I've written before, specifically this old blog post and the relevant chapter of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog.
As usual, I tried but probably failed to do justice to other interpretations in the "Dig Deeper" references I sent; outraged Bohmians should feel free to comment either here or there with better explanations.
Again, it's really fun to see the images the animators found to put to my words. I love…
drorzel | August 28, 2014The second day of the "Quantum Boot Camp" was much lighter on talks. The only speaker was Ray Laflamme from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, who gave a nice introduction to quantum technologies. While he did spend a bit of time at the start going through Shor's algorithm for factoring numbers (following up a discussion from Wednesday), he mostly focused on ways to use quantum physics to improve sensors of technological interest.
So, for example, he talked about how efforts to develop techniques for error-correcting codes in liquid state NMR quantum computing led to the…
drorzel | July 18, 2014As noted last week, I went to SteelyKid's day camp on Tuesday to talk about being a college professor. This was a little awkward, because I was scheduled to talk to kids ranging from not-quite-three to six-and-a-bit, and really, what do they care about the daily routine of physics faculty?
So, I did a simple demo. While I got a lot of really interesting suggestions in the comments to last week's post, most of them required more props than I wanted to drag with me. And for that age, simple is often enough. So, I just did the tennis-ball-on-a-soccer-ball trick. For the benefit of readers who…